Joseph Kanon

After a long war American Adam Miller made his way to Venice where his mother is trying to re-create her pre-war life. There he meets Claudia, a Jewess whose father died in a concentration camp. When they discover the man responsible for this there is a confrontation, after which Adam and Claudia need to construct an unbreakable alibi.

Jake Geismar, foreign correspondent in pre-war Berlin, returns in 1945 to cover the Potsdam conference, but he finds the city unrecognisable. Trawling through the illegal night clubs and the thriving black market, Jake discovers that the twilight war of intrigue between west and east has already begun and that he could quite easily be one of its first casualties.